Cuban President Fidel Castro wrote an opinion column this week mentioning “the seemingly invincible ticket that might be created with Hillary for president and Obama for vice president.” And Fidel’s the expert on invincibility: I have never once seen that guy without a cigar and I have never once seen him dead from smoking lots of cigars.

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Because I’m from Colorado, I’m one of very few folks out in NYC who know anything about Republican presidential candidate Tom Tancredo. A lot of what he has to say is about immigration, but he’s kind of branching out now, which you have to do as a presidential candidate. So, for example, he’s made an interesting policy choice in telling New Orleans to go f— itself. While all of the news outlets are busy reporting sob stories about how post-Katrina New Orleans is still a mess and just as unprepared as pre-Katrina New Orleans, Tancredo says, “You know? How about I don’t care? How about that?”

Dude is a tactical brillius (obviously a combination of the words brilliant and genius). When all the candidates are talking about infrastructure in the wake of like, just a few deaths and catastrophes, Tommy Tank Tancredo is all about the greenbacks. Yo, we need that money so we can institutionalize racism and drop bombs of hatred. That stuff doesn’t pay for itself. So. It’s not like he’s a one-issue guy.

I can’t make my high school reunion today, so here’s an open letter.

Dear high school,

Dave Burdick here. Class of ‘01. Sorry I couldn’t make it, I’m suddenly in New York. Side note: if you ever move to New York, make up whatever you want about Colorado. People will believe it. I have been telling people that at higher elevations, gravity is noticeably weaker.

We haven’t talked for a while, so here are a couple of updates:

You know I’d been working at a wiseass, youth-targeted newspaper, but that ended a while back for any number of totally boring journalism-industry reasons. The reasons are so boring that no matter how many times I’ve told and tried to hone the story since January of ‘06, people always fall asleep. So here’s a more interesting, fictional reason: a secret war broke out between sentient mountaintomatoes (which exist in Colorado… something to do with the thinner air) and our editor, an old prospector we found frozen underneath an abandoned mine.

The base unit of this ruler is meters.

The mountaintomatoes, savvy bastards that they are, bought up all the supermarkets and liquor stores in our small-town market and refused to buy advertising in our paper unless our old prospector editor told them the location of his secret underground moonshine facility. A standoff. Advertising dollars were lost; the paper folded.

Most of the rest of this letter is true.

After spending six months in blissful unemployment peppered with comedy gigs, I took a job as the lead copywriter in the marketing department of the only accredited Buddhist-inspired university int he United States. I am neither a Buddhist nor a marketer. In fact, if you were to create a spectrum of personalities from Buddhist to marketer, I would fall somewhere in the middle, not really very close to either.

That’s me in the middle.

In April or May of this year I accidentally got into graduate school and moved to New York, which is where I’m now living. During the reunion, I will be moving into my new apartment in Harlem, up the street from a famous old jazz club. My roommates and I are considering ordering an IKEA chair and maybe a bookcase to our new place, which means that my new very favorite mental image is that big yellow and blue IKEA truck rolling up through Harlem, ideally getting a little lost at first.

So that’s what’s up with me. And I’ve been wondering, high school, why didn’t you teach me to value professions that could, say, make big bucks? Yeah, the values and friendships have been handy at times, but I am running out of money. It’s not even about the Benjamins for me right now. It’s seriously — on a good day — all about the Abrahams. We are nearing the day when it’s all about the Sacajaweas.

I got a free haircut this weekend because I saw a little piece of paper in a window that said “male haircut models needed for practice.” The haircut is fine. I probably lost about four inches of hair. The main catch was that the haircut clocked in at just over two hours. It was the longest haircut of my life — and because it’s a training haircut, it was the longest potentially awful haircut in the world.

At one point I was sitting there sweating as, for 45 minutes, I had the most bogus mullet in history because my stylist was asking questions of her instructor after cutting each section of my hair. They were whispered questions, but here is how I imagine them going:

Q: How do I cut this part of his hair?
A: Still scissors.

So all I’m saying is, you couldn’t inspire me to pursue some more lucrative career path that isn’t so prohibitively poorly-paid that I can’t pay for haircuts?

You other college graduates, did you go to school for something smart? Like science? If so, nice work. If not, guys, I’m so sorry I didn’t send you some kind of warning to switch majors. We’re all screwed. Current college students, DO NOT STUDY WRITING. I DON’T NEED THE COMPETITION.

My advice would be to invent a profession because there is already somebody out here in the world who is better at everything than you. Especially writing and comedy and minor league baseball (a story for another time). This concludes our pep talk. Go Tiny Pioneers!

Love,
Dave

These aren’t news jokes, they’re just joke jokes. Sometimes you have to write joke jokes. And sometimes you have to update your blog. When those times meet, you get this crappy post.

So, I’m currently unemployed. I do almost nothing during the day, which is not terribly different from life when I was employed, except that I’m even less likely to go out at night. I just sit around at home, eating and digesting. I’ve gotten really good at me. Friend of mine called me and asked, “Yo Dave, what are you up to tonight?” I said, “I’m eating a giant baked potato and taking a giant crap.” And I said that fully looking forward to both parts.

He said “I’m going to a huge party with a lot of babes, you want to go?” I said, “I told you, I’m busy.”

I’ve been meeting a lot of people from other places lately. I met a guy from Michigan and asked where in Michigan he was from. He said Michigan is shaped like a hand, then held his hand up and pointed between his thumb and forefinger and said that’s where he’s from. Every state has one of those. I met a guy from Florida and asked where he was from and he pulled out his flaccid dong and pointed to where he was from.

Key West, it turns out. But these are really absurd ways of telling someone where you’re from. Colorado has the best one. We’re a rectangle. We’re in the shape of a map of Colorado. So if someone asks me where I’m from in Colorado, I just pull out a map and point at my flaccid dong. I don’t know why I do that, just habit, I guess. A bad habit. I’m on the patch and the gum, but I can’t stop pointing at my junk.

I’m looking for apartments in New York right now. I’ve been looking on Craigslist, which is a terrible idea. You have no idea if people are crazy or not, so you look for little code words. If someone says they’re “neat” and looking for a “tidy roommate,” it probably means they’re not a crackhead and not looking for a crackhead roommate. If they say they’re looking for a “tidy roommate” and once had a roommate who said they were tidy but weren’t actually tidy, it means they’re gonna be real assholes about everything.

Yeah, OK, there were going to be more, but I had to go tell them. The maps thing went very well. Goodnight.